Nvidia RTX 4090 review: a hair-raising new bar for PC graphics performance

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Advancements in PC graphics always move at a breakneck speed, but it does feel like things have been moving particularly quickly of late. Every recent new generation features leaps that are an order of magnitude larger than the last – though keeping up has also involved breaking the bank, either due to initially high vendor pricing or ridiculous gouging driven by crypto nonsense. The trend continues with Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 4090 – a jaw-droppingly powerful new flagship card with a neat party trick: it breaks performance measurement.

What I mean by this is that the 4090 routinely and quite effortlessly does what I’ve only seen other cards do in very specific circumstances: it hits the point at which games can’t perform any better – not because of the card, but because the CPU can’t keep picking up what this beastly GPU is throwing down. This was primarily happening at lower resolutions like 1080p and 1440p but even occurred occasionally at 4K – and it was occurring with relatively recent games like Marvel’s Spider-Man. Maybe this’ll change with the imminent release of Intel’s 13th generation ‘Raptor Lake’ CPUs will help that element of the PC to catch up.

Regardless of what happens there, I feel like this is a pretty potent place to start a discussion about the 4090. At £1650/$1600, it carries an overwhelming price, but what you get for that is also overwhelming performance. This card is the new benchmark, the new high watermark – though it’s really only going to be completely worth it for those who have an entire setup that can support it – which means at the very least a top-range monitor and CPU, plus an overly-healthy amount of RAM.

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